1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for generating user interface configuration pages to configure a computing resource comprised of component computing resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are two types of configuration programs to guide a user through a chain of configuration settings to configure a computing resource, dialogs and guided actions, such as a configuration wizard. The dialog technique operates by providing dialog pages, where each page is relevant to one step of the chain of configuration settings and is autonomous in that one page is not dependent on the other. The user must succeed in the configuration in one dialog page, and only when configurations in one page successfully complete will the dialog open a different dialog and continue to the next dialog page and configuration operations. However, with the dialog technique, if one dialog page is blocked due to a dependency of a setting entered through an earlier dialog page, the user may need to close the dialog, open another, and then fix the problem by going back to the previous dialog page in which the conflicting setting was introduce. However, with the dialog pages, the user is not aware of where in the dialog pages the problem occurred to allow the user to proceed to the correct dialog page to enter the correct setting.
The other type of configuration technique involves guided action, also referred to as a wizard, to guide the user through a set of actions where at the end all the actions are committed if there are no dependency conflicts in entered settings. The issue with guided action technique is that the guided action program does not provide the user with sufficient information to know all dependencies and prerequisites while performing the configuration in a particular panel and before proceeding to the next panel. Thus, the error may not be introduced until after several panels into the wizard, which makes it difficult for the user to determine the cause of the error in order to take actions to fix the problem.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for providing a user interface to configure a computational resource.